Banjo
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About this ebook
While Banjo opens with a clutch of fine lyrics, elegies and set-pieces, at the heart of Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s new book is a remarkable tale of darkness and light, music and silence. Celebrating the centenary of Captain Scott’s arrival at the South Pole in 1912, Banjo gives us new psychological insight into the lives of the early Antarctic pioneers, as well as an extraordinary account of the role played by music in surviving the long Antarctic winters. Banjo is Wynne-Rhydderch’s most accomplished collection to date, and further evidence of a writer of great imaginative versatility.
'Everything is close to the nerve, everything under cool emotional pressure. The cuts blossom into freshness and colour. And delight, the delight borne out of precision of sound and an exquisite command of register’ George Szirtes
‘Lines full of beauty, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes stark . . . implicating us in the essential human situations, life, death and survival, she explores’ Philip Gross
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has published two collections, Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), and Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008), which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2009.
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Banjo - Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Acknowledgements
Sewer
White seems an unwise shade for hip waders
but slip into them. Descend the drains,
shafts, intestines of Paris to map
each tunnel onto a boulevard
six storeys up where waiters brush crumbs,
scrawl on chalkboards. Bricks, crypts,
ticks, cracks. Cataphilia is catching
under this city on stilts. Inside
its arteries you’re on the run
from a rogue gene, the shake of its tail
at each corner. Catacombs, sewers, cables,
pipes. The rules of the surface world
do not apply. You could hide in galleries,
along corridors of trains, watermains, seams
of bones, but best follow your guide through
cool vaults, flirt under palettes of sediment.
Again. Did you hear it? That’s your heart
in plastercast in quarries of gypsum,
wine cellars, reservoirs, canals. Be glad
of ladders, that you’re not in splints,
that arms will lift you through the layers
of lumps to scans, ultrasound, blood counts.
Gypo
The turquoise eyes of peacocks’ tails
at Powis Castle persuaded me
that pattern matters. So did the geometry
of pink brick twisted chimneys
at Compton Wynyates in whose
knot gardens I found myself
lost and intricate at eight.
I’d memorise visors, Gothic screens,
gables and displays of tapestries.
I could tell a Pembroke
from a Pier table, played
Greensleeves on the recorder
in places where I did not live
but visited in the pages
of Treasures of Britain
on a fold-out table in the caravan
where I grew up on the outskirts
of Burnley. In love with the symmetric
pleading of sleeping knights,
brass-necked down to their
pointy toes, I’d cup the faces
of misericords like much-loved dolls,
design chevrons for my family shield,
draw the Queen’s buckskin boots
and virginals, squeeze myself into
the chicken run to check I’d still
fit, dreamed one day I’d own a
Ha-ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Vive la Résistance!
It was on such a night as this that I floated
like a débutante into the arms of a cornfield
outside Rouen, my parachute silks streaming
into a bridal train adorning